Jann Wenner

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“I believe that a neat office is a good workplace and a neat desk reflects an orderly mind,” Rolling Stone co-founder and publisher Jann Wenner told The Washington Post in 2006, confessing that he personally conducts cleanliness inspections of employees’ desks. “So we clean the office up every year and everybody’s required to go throw out all their old stuff. And the place looks great.”

Less tidy lately has been Rolling Stone’s journalistic integrity. In November 2014, the magazine published “A Rape on Campus,” which told the story of “Jackie,” who’d allegedly been gang-raped at a University of Virginia frat party. Problem was, there were major holes in Jackie’s story, and the writer and editors made the ill-fated decision not to pursue the alleged rapists or any of Jackie’s friends who might’ve unspooled her yarn. Wenner didn’t help matters when he later called Jackie a “really expert fabulist storyteller.” As the media storm swirling around the magazine approached terminal velocity, Wenner commissioned the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism to investigate the matter and issue a report, which concluded that Rolling Stone’s failures of reporting “involve basic, even routine journalistic practice.” In fact, the report used the word “failure” at least 19 times. Despite all this, no heads immediately rolled (though the lawsuits quickly started rolling in, and managing editor Will Dana eventually resigned).

Rolling Stone got more egg on its face in January after it published a gallivanting 10,000-word puff piece by Sean Penn about drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, whom Penn had secretly interviewed in a mountain jungle clearing. Even Penn himself admitted the piece had been a “failure” that essentially portrayed the brutal Guzman as a simple farmer and family man. Among other questionable practices, Penn and Rolling Stone had agreed to give Guzman pre-publication approval, a big journalistic no-no for any credible journalistic entity. But Wenner brushed it off as “a small thing to do in exchange for what we got.”
Despite the recent missteps, Rolling Stone, which Wenner co-founded in San Francisco in 1969 with $7,500 borrowed from family, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. And with more than a dozen National Magazine Awards and a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, neither is Wenner. Tidy up those cubicles, kids!